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A review by sweetcuppincakes
The End by Karl Ove Knausgård
4.0
Interesting to read reviews of this book here, and the variance in people's preferred sections from the book. It's definitely a book sandwiched within a book, but it can also seem like the two slices of bread of this Min Kamp sandwich are quite different from one another.
Part 8, in its most Knausgaardian rhythm and style, feels more continuous with the previous books in his seamless switching between autobiographical recollection - the meaningless/meticulous/mystifying/maddening/mendacious minutiae of the ordinary - to his insights and musings of Big Themes and Life, as well as the meta-narrative - infused with guilt and grandiose artistic purpose - that addresses what he's actually doing (does he even know?) in writing what he's written... and writing. It's great. Uncle Gunnar, who never had much of a presence in Book 1 or the others, suddenly looms large in Knausgaard's conscience, much like his father always has throughout the series.
Part 9, some of the most uncomfortable reading in the whole series, with his depiction of his wife Linda as being a hopeless case who can't do her share of household duties when he has to work - a revisited theme from Book 2 that is considerably harsher, more critical... and quite unfair. One sides with Knausgaard to an extent, feeling the frustrations of marital divisions of labor and bread-winning (with a comical interlude when Knausgaard's prodigality - which we've read before in his pocket hole-burning proclivities when he's flush with book royalties cash - takes the best of him as he considers buying a timeshare in the Canary Islands with the intriguing perk that they can use any of the hotel chain's properties around the world (kinda cool, no?), and it's actually Linda, surprised by Karl Ove's keenness for wasting a small fortune, who brings him around), but it takes a quick 180° when Linda's shopping habits and inability to cope with her motherly duties reveal themselves to be the return of her bipolar disorder, taking her into a deep, despairing depression (and Knausgaard into a comparatively less deep, ankle-soaking puddle of guilt), followed by a frightening period of mania in which the Linda he knew has just gone - on a long journey, as she later says - only to, quite suddenly, return. And then the book basically ends. This part feels rushed, breathless, perhaps both in his writing of it (as the deadline is a constant reminder, and the mention of the looming deadline and the beginning of Linda's depression seems to be around the time he's writing about Turner and Claude, somewhere in the first half of The Name and the Number section, so he still has more than half of the book to write at that point!), but also rushed in his jettisoning of his usual insights and memory-meanderings amidst the 'straight-forward' auto-biographical narrative. The imbalance between parts 8 and 9 (with different English translators as well - that can't help) might become even more apparent if one were to just read parts 8 and 9 back to back, upon a second reading... something I thought I would do myself as I was struggling through the middle Name and Number section... because that section, well, what can one say? It's fairly divisive, to say the least...
The Name and the Number, smack-dab in the middle of your regular Knausgaard programming, comes this sprawling, 452-page long-form essay, [pseudo-]philosophizing, and regurgitation of big chunks of Hitler's Mein Kampf and his various biographies. It's Knausgaard at his biggest, boldest - flexing his literary prowess to show the world (but probably mostly himself) that he's worth it, dammit! It's at times brilliant - a non-philosopher's philosophical journey through meaning, the 'I', the 'we', the 'they', the tension in art of being both singular and unique on the one hand, yet universal and understandable on the other to have the greatest impact. It's also at times vexing, inane, and utterly tedious - going literally word by word in an onanistic exegesis of a Paul Celan poem. Page after page, me thinking to myself, 'Karl Ove, why are you doing this to me? Please come back...' (Fun Book 6 drinking game: take a shot every time the phrase 'to all intents and purposes' pops up. So annoying! Shouldn't it be 'for all intents and purposes', anyway?) But once you get to the Hitler biography, even if it's quite secondarily sourced by its nature, and coming from someone who has not known much about Adolf before he was Hitler, it's quite riveting. People expecting broad strokes and dot-connecting between Min Kamp and Mein Kampf obviously weren't paying much attention, and Manny's review here is dead on.
So the turn for me - being fixated on my future re-reading schedule for all the books (I'd re-read Books 1 and 2 while waiting for 5, and want to go back to 3, 4, 5, and eventually 6 again) - was that, while I thought or felt I grasped the theme or point of Name and Number, and that any future re-reading could just skip it and go from parts 8 to 9, I think that I may only want to read Name and Number again - to really grasp it, hold and juggle all the ideas simultaneously in appreciative awe. I seemingly give Knausgaard short shrift here for this section, critical because I don't buy its audacity or necessity to even be in this book (and not edited down a bit - where was Geir, whichever one, or both, when you needed them!). But it definitely deserves closer reading. And an index wouldn't have hurt - I mean, thanks for the bibliography, but we really need an index.
And I do think I felt the theme, rather than understood it or ratiocinated it, because if there's one thematic kernel that repeats itself throughout Min Kamp, through his relationship with Linda, and seems to be driven toward in Name and Number, is that he values emotions and feeling over understanding and rigor. It's just ironic that his means of getting to this 'conclusion' are completely antithetical, especially in his Celan analysis (I secretly hope that Knausgaard was very self-aware of how annoying it would be for his readers to read the analysis, so as to prove his point in the end). It's also ironic that, in Book 5, what he claimed he would be relegated to as a failed author who could never find his unique voice, and which he seemed he was very capable of and could do in spades, was literary criticism. But if Name and Number is an example of such literary criticism, juxtaposed with the Knausgaard we've come to know and feel to be alive, in many of us, sharing his first-world, white guy problems Struggle that celebrates and prods to death the 'human condition', then I much prefer that voice, and he's obviously found it. And rather than re-reading it all again, I must also read Out of the World and A Time for Everything, to experience his voice somewhere - possibly - removed from himself.
Part 8, in its most Knausgaardian rhythm and style, feels more continuous with the previous books in his seamless switching between autobiographical recollection - the meaningless/meticulous/mystifying/maddening/mendacious minutiae of the ordinary - to his insights and musings of Big Themes and Life, as well as the meta-narrative - infused with guilt and grandiose artistic purpose - that addresses what he's actually doing (does he even know?) in writing what he's written... and writing. It's great. Uncle Gunnar, who never had much of a presence in Book 1 or the others, suddenly looms large in Knausgaard's conscience, much like his father always has throughout the series.
Part 9, some of the most uncomfortable reading in the whole series, with his depiction of his wife Linda as being a hopeless case who can't do her share of household duties when he has to work - a revisited theme from Book 2 that is considerably harsher, more critical... and quite unfair. One sides with Knausgaard to an extent, feeling the frustrations of marital divisions of labor and bread-winning (with a comical interlude when Knausgaard's prodigality - which we've read before in his pocket hole-burning proclivities when he's flush with book royalties cash - takes the best of him as he considers buying a timeshare in the Canary Islands with the intriguing perk that they can use any of the hotel chain's properties around the world (kinda cool, no?), and it's actually Linda, surprised by Karl Ove's keenness for wasting a small fortune, who brings him around), but it takes a quick 180° when Linda's shopping habits and inability to cope with her motherly duties reveal themselves to be the return of her bipolar disorder, taking her into a deep, despairing depression (and Knausgaard into a comparatively less deep, ankle-soaking puddle of guilt), followed by a frightening period of mania in which the Linda he knew has just gone - on a long journey, as she later says - only to, quite suddenly, return. And then the book basically ends. This part feels rushed, breathless, perhaps both in his writing of it (as the deadline is a constant reminder, and the mention of the looming deadline and the beginning of Linda's depression seems to be around the time he's writing about Turner and Claude, somewhere in the first half of The Name and the Number section, so he still has more than half of the book to write at that point!), but also rushed in his jettisoning of his usual insights and memory-meanderings amidst the 'straight-forward' auto-biographical narrative. The imbalance between parts 8 and 9 (with different English translators as well - that can't help) might become even more apparent if one were to just read parts 8 and 9 back to back, upon a second reading... something I thought I would do myself as I was struggling through the middle Name and Number section... because that section, well, what can one say? It's fairly divisive, to say the least...
The Name and the Number, smack-dab in the middle of your regular Knausgaard programming, comes this sprawling, 452-page long-form essay, [pseudo-]philosophizing, and regurgitation of big chunks of Hitler's Mein Kampf and his various biographies. It's Knausgaard at his biggest, boldest - flexing his literary prowess to show the world (but probably mostly himself) that he's worth it, dammit! It's at times brilliant - a non-philosopher's philosophical journey through meaning, the 'I', the 'we', the 'they', the tension in art of being both singular and unique on the one hand, yet universal and understandable on the other to have the greatest impact. It's also at times vexing, inane, and utterly tedious - going literally word by word in an onanistic exegesis of a Paul Celan poem. Page after page, me thinking to myself, 'Karl Ove, why are you doing this to me? Please come back...' (Fun Book 6 drinking game: take a shot every time the phrase 'to all intents and purposes' pops up. So annoying! Shouldn't it be 'for all intents and purposes', anyway?) But once you get to the Hitler biography, even if it's quite secondarily sourced by its nature, and coming from someone who has not known much about Adolf before he was Hitler, it's quite riveting. People expecting broad strokes and dot-connecting between Min Kamp and Mein Kampf obviously weren't paying much attention, and Manny's review here is dead on.
So the turn for me - being fixated on my future re-reading schedule for all the books (I'd re-read Books 1 and 2 while waiting for 5, and want to go back to 3, 4, 5, and eventually 6 again) - was that, while I thought or felt I grasped the theme or point of Name and Number, and that any future re-reading could just skip it and go from parts 8 to 9, I think that I may only want to read Name and Number again - to really grasp it, hold and juggle all the ideas simultaneously in appreciative awe. I seemingly give Knausgaard short shrift here for this section, critical because I don't buy its audacity or necessity to even be in this book (and not edited down a bit - where was Geir, whichever one, or both, when you needed them!). But it definitely deserves closer reading. And an index wouldn't have hurt - I mean, thanks for the bibliography, but we really need an index.
And I do think I felt the theme, rather than understood it or ratiocinated it, because if there's one thematic kernel that repeats itself throughout Min Kamp, through his relationship with Linda, and seems to be driven toward in Name and Number, is that he values emotions and feeling over understanding and rigor. It's just ironic that his means of getting to this 'conclusion' are completely antithetical, especially in his Celan analysis (I secretly hope that Knausgaard was very self-aware of how annoying it would be for his readers to read the analysis, so as to prove his point in the end). It's also ironic that, in Book 5, what he claimed he would be relegated to as a failed author who could never find his unique voice, and which he seemed he was very capable of and could do in spades, was literary criticism. But if Name and Number is an example of such literary criticism, juxtaposed with the Knausgaard we've come to know and feel to be alive, in many of us, sharing his first-world, white guy problems Struggle that celebrates and prods to death the